“Fuck it. OK, tell me, go on, I dare you, tell me now, did you honestly come into my magazine, my cab, my life completely by coincidence?” One last shot at a direct question.
“Katherine, why would you possibly think anything else? I mean, that’s completely insane.” You shook your head and almost laughed, as if I’d said the most absurd thing you ever heard, then added, “Sorry, I wasn’t in any way referring to what happened to you last year. You being sick.”
“I didn’t think you were. I asked you a question.”
“I gave you an answer.”
“Did you?”
“OK, if I didn’t end up here by fate, coincidence, what else is happening here?”
“How am I supposed to fucking know? You tell me!” You looked at me as if you really didn’t have a clue what I was on about. Great liar, not a bad actor either. I was on the spot again, like the crazy one out of the two of us again. “Oh God, Lily…I don’t know…What’s going on with me,” I mumbled, feeling like a trainee reporter who’d choked on their killer question.
“Please, tell me about what happened to you in there. I want to hear it. I want to know and I think you’d like to tell someone.” Your hand reached over to mine and you gave me a little squeeze. So warm, so precision-engineered to make me put the saltwater to my lips.
I spoke with my eyes closed. “Every night since last Monday, in fact every time I close my eyes to sleep, I see myself as a child. Alone, walking through a terrifying version of my childhood. My dad’s gone and my mother watches me from on high, but she doesn’t help. She wants to watch me struggle. She should be protecting me, but she isn’t. She wants me to hurt. I’m on my own, bleeding, about to fall down a black hole. The only way I can save myself is by proving her wrong and reaching this old gate on the farm I was brought up on. I reached it today, for the first time, but all it did was make me bleed more.”
Your breath was suddenly audible. Then you were silent for a moment before asking quietly, “Shall we get another bottle?”
“If you’d like to, Lily.” Had I actually got somewhere with my little confession, stirred something real in you, a revelation that might unlock the reasons for you coming into my life?
You summoned a waiter, ordered more champagne, then turned back to me. “How about we do a bit of an exercise? It’ll be good for you and it means I don’t have to completely lie to Gem tomorrow about us doing any work today.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’ll be like drunk writing therapy.”
“Come on, we can just make shit up about what we did today. Or you can tell me everything you know about great writing tomorrow. I think I’ve got a five-minute window somewhere.”
“Very funny,” you said without laughing. “I’m serious. Get out your laptop.”
I rolled my eyes but complied. What did you think you could do to me next? You retrieved your laptop from your yellow case and I opened mine. “All right then, what are we doing?”
“I want you to write about the worst day of your life. You have five minutes. No talking, no thinking time, just do it. I’ll do it too. We’ll read each other’s work and discuss. Go on. Do it. Katherine, I want you to put something of yourself into it. I will if you will.”
Such sudden intensity. Intoxicating. “OK.”
And it came to me immediately, like a black arrow shooting from the past into the back of my brain. It startled me how ready this day was to come to the surface. I hesitated for a second. Why tell you about it? I looked over to you and saw you peer penetratingly into your laptop. You did seem to be pouring yourself into the task. I began to type, timidly at first, then, wanting to match your apparent effort, I let the once-familiar thrill of writing for myself take me over:
So this was it. The thing I’d been made to wait for. The thing I’d expected to escort me to another plane. The thing my mother told me never to do.
I’d decided exactly how I’d wanted to do it. He knew I’d never done it before and was surprised when I began to command him: Sit against this wall and let me do it to you. And don’t speak. I kept my clothes on, guided him into me, and waited to feel that feeling; to escape the farm, to transform, to become the woman my mother had never wanted me to be. I prepared for my metamorphosis.
Seconds later, I’m looking at his bowed head and I have to stop myself from bashing it against the wall behind him. I imagined the blank thud of his skull.
“Right, time’s up.”
“God, that went quick. I really enjoyed that. I’ve not written anything that wasn’t for work for ages.”
I handed over my laptop and as you readied yourself to read my little vignette from my darkest ages you said, “You should start a fiction blog or something, get writing, get noticed while you write, you know, share stuff?”
Good God, this is what all you millennials think, isn’t it? Something’s only worth a damn if it’s “shared,” observed by someone else? You lot can be so holier-than-thou about everything: your diets, your overcomplicated and curated “identities,” your “triggers,” your overwrought moral codes, your widespread resistance to booze, but show such terrific lack of discipline when it comes to private thought.
“You shouldn’t worry if your writing’s a little ragged. We only get better by sharing and learning from each other.” You smiled sweetly, but danger was dancing just below the surface.
“I’m not worried in the slightest.” I thought at the time about what an incredible cocky madam you were, to consider that I’d assume my writing would be in some way inferior. “Go on, hand it over. Let’s see what you’ve got,” I said.
I half-snatched your laptop off you and started to read.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why they don’t want me. They’re sending me away again. It always feels like someone wants to send me away, just for being me. My soul is thinking, Here we go again. Being sent away is the only thing it really knows.
I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I was hurt first. That’s where it started. I’ve been made this way and it isn’t all my fault anyway. I can’t help it if other people are weaker than me. But they don’t see it like that. So here I am, with a red trunk that looks like it belongs to someone else, but it’s got my name on it. My mum and my aunt are packing me off “for my own good,” but I hate them for what they’re doing to me. Today is the worst day, but it’s only a clone of all other ones I’ve had so far and all those other worst days I know will come.
We finished at the same time. So, this was who you really were. A lonely child whose carer treated you like a burden. My struggle too.
You were back inside your head again when the waiter showed up with the next bottle and started to remove the foil. My words seemed to have affected you.
“No, don’t take that off. I think we should take this to go. Katherine, I’d like to go somewhere and keep writing. Would you?”
“Yes, I really would,” I told you.
“The bill please.”
And I was as thrilled as I was scared. I was scared of who you were and what you wanted from my life, but exhilarated at the idea of being alone with you. You’d started to free up Iain’s creativity. Now you were liberating mine. This is how you got away with it all. Probably the greatest of all your gifts.
I started to pack my things.
“So who was he then?” you asked.
“The guy? No one.”
“You didn’t keep in touch at all?”
“Nope. He kept coming by. I stopped letting him in. Don’t look at me like that! It was the most disappointing experience of my life. He was a grown man and I was just a girl who had a farm to sell. My mother had just died, I was about to go bankrupt. I knew I had to get out, I knew I had to get away to London or I’d die. I couldn’t have anyone holding me back. What, did you want to marry the first guy you shagged?”
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I didn’t wait for an answer and headed to the bathroom. By the time I’d come back, you’d paid our bill.
“I thought all people your age were broke?”
“Some of us are just broken,” I thought I heard you say, quietly and to yourself.
* * *
—
WE LEFT THE LOBBY and I was too pissed for public transport, so climbed into one of the black cabs waiting outside. You followed.
“Just like old times,” you said, bending to get in while I slid over to the far side. I went to inhale the freshness of you, like that first morning I met you. The memory made me try to drag you toward the truth again with a question. “Just how freaked out must you have been when you saw me that day, given you’d been trailing me?”
“Katherine, really. You make me sound terrible.”
“And aren’t you?”
“No. No, not really,” you said, but your intensity, the way you deliberately left your eyes on mine before looking out of your window, made me gaze out of mine to consider my next move. Cat and mouse. I didn’t want to bother starting another big conversation there and then, I wanted to get to your place, pour us a glass, and try to circle the truth until it had nowhere to go but out of you. But you had other ideas.
“So, do you know what ever happened to him then?”
“Who?”
“The guy from your worst day?”
We were at Gray’s Inn Road. I used to go there all the time when I first moved to London. There were pubs where you could pick up bicycle couriers, wiry and hard, just like me. I wondered how many times in my life, like then, I had wished it was the nineties again.
“No. It was a lifetime ago now, and I’m not the type of person who likes to look back to the bad times. Difficult pasts exist for people like me to break away from.” I thought about your patchwork education and your written confessional on the loneliness of the unloved boarder. “Maybe for people like you too?”
You went to speak, then got flustered and stopped yourself. I’d struck a nerve. Whatever you’d done in your past, it had fucked you up too.
* * *
—
WE REACHED MANOR HOUSE and I kept looking around to make sure we didn’t run into Iain, in case he wanted me to come home, or ask to join our writing session. I couldn’t have either.
But in the end, we didn’t end up seeing Iain, or writing.
I followed you as you scampered into your building like you didn’t want to be seen with me. Perhaps I was too old, too uncool. You made us walk to the tenth floor using the service stairs. You said it made you a better cyclist, but this sounded like another lie I could only fill the gaps around. As soon as we got inside, you pulled out a bottle of Rioja, poured it into two stemless glasses. You’d come around to my taste in wine. You played around with your phone for a second and put some music on. You watched me as you waited for the first chord to resonate around your huge apartment. It reverberated off the floor-to-ceiling windows and went straight into my heart. The opening jangle of “Panic” by The Smiths.
You liked the same music I did.
I had no idea people like you liked Morrissey and The Smiths. You started to dance toward me. You took my hands and I danced too.
You made me remember how good it felt to jump and smile and sweat and sing. I felt the years leave me, dancing with you, our bodies blurring together, laughing and panting in the pauses between songs. My pissed mind drifted toward what all my old lot were doing now. You’d given me a shot at pride again, perhaps even arrogance, because I remember thinking, as I took your hand and spun you around, I bet they aren’t dancing with cool young people on a Thursday afternoon. I wonder if they still have any reason to dance at all.
For the first time in years I felt I could have a friend, and when I did, it was like coming up on a really good pill. Incredible. You made me feel young, until you made me feel so old. A sudden twinge in my back. An old running injury in my groin making itself known, meanwhile your body, so lithe, so perfect, silhouetted against the sun shining off the reservoir ten floors down seemed to mock mine.
I loved your place. I wished your place and your life were mine. I wanted what you had: a blank canvas for you to paint your fresh, hopeful life on. Lucky you. Amazing you.
We danced some more, jumping around, then performing together for an imaginary crowd on the path by the reservoir below, laughing at the rest of the world, together. I saw how you could indeed see my place from a window on the opposite side of the flat that faced out over Green Lanes. How small my slice of the building looked from there. I turned my back on it all to dance with you again.
I think it was after “Sheila Take a Bow” that we ended up holding each other. The next song was “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want,” and we started to sway together, in time to our pulses.
The room started to spin.
“Katherine,” you murmured.
The warm, fresh smell of your hair as I rested my head against yours and the intoxicating feeling we were going to be friends filled me as I slipped into sleep.
* * *
—
IT WAS DARK outside when I woke. No lights on in your flat. We were at opposite ends of a sofa. You’d changed into a vest and jogging pants and were still asleep. I got up as quietly as I could, felt the rush of the booze in my mouth, and tried to straighten myself without gagging. You breathed deeply and I watched you for a moment. You looked so sweet and innocent. How could I have ever let myself be afraid of you?
I reached your door. Something red caught the corner of my eye. The trunk you’d written about. It was pushed up into a deep alcove by the door. I stepped toward it. It was beaten up from being dragged back and forth from boarding school again and again. You hated that trunk and yet it had become something you just couldn’t let go of, through sheer familiarity. It exuded loneliness. Did that trunk, which you packed and unpacked your little life into, feel like your one constant?
I let myself touch one of the worn corners. Something glinted: your initials, in gilt on the face of the trunk, between the buckles. A wave of nausea.
LF.
Not LL.
I knew you were a liar from the moment I met you.
MARCH 16—COPY CAMP DAY, CONTINUED
When I see her at the hotel she looks beaten already. Why? I’ve hardly even started yet. What, exactly, is so very wrong with her life that she hates it so much? Why is she so totally ungrateful? She’s always feeling sorry for herself when her life has been so far free of consequences for the things she’s done. Let’s look at the evidence.
Like so many people her age, she owns her own place. She has a job that pays real-life, actual, cash money. She has a partner who loves her and she’s been able to maintain a supportive relationship and a home together for a big part of her adult life. What KR can’t see yet is that she has things she doesn’t deserve. What has she got to be depressed about? She gets a new boss? Boo-the-freak-hoo. She thinks she’s poor (she’s completely obsessed by money), trust me, she has no idea. She’s getting on a bit—really? Women like me should be learning from women like her: child-free by choice, professional, in control of her own destiny. She probably thinks she’s a feminist, but I just know she wouldn’t want to take me under her wing and help me learn from her. Just like the rest of her generation, she’s so ready to put her energy into hating me, pulling the ladder up behind her to stop me from ever reaching higher. It makes me wonder again what Ruth would make of KR. So many of the things Ruth said she wanted to change about the world come together in KR. It’s so obvious: Katherine Ross has to be changed or be stopped.
She got herself naked like she was rebelling against me, like I’m the adult and she’s the defiant child. On the table, she closes her eyes and falls asleep. I watch her dreaming. She seems soft. Innocent. Then, from nowhere, she sits up,
panting like a dog, groaning, totally, genuinely freaked out. She’s naked and confused and old, like she has no idea where she is. The masseuses are massively shocked. They look at each other like they just want her out of there as quickly as possible. One rolls their eyes behind her back. Guess what? I didn’t like it. For some reason, I didn’t want to see her fall. Again. See, despite what they say, I am not naturally bad. I think there was once a chance for me to be good, but somewhere between my mum and Gem, it got lost.
When she comes to find me in the Mirror Room, she’s stomping and striding again. The vulnerable older lady has gone and it’s pure KR. She’s banging on at me about how much better the old days were, humiliating me for not being a hardened smoker. When the little YBA cakes I ordered for her arrive, her sneering was laughably predictable. (That was too much to resist. I knew it would get a rise out of her.)
She asks me about my college newspaper. I’ve not spoken about that time with anyone else who wasn’t my solicitor, Gem, or Mum, and none of those conversations were with people who were properly on my side. It would have been nice to be able to share it with someone who’d get why I did what I did, because I think KR would. She knows what it is to try to do something, be something for yourself. She knows how it feels when you’ve found something you think might be capable of changing you, separating you from the messed-up child you were and don’t want to be anymore.
I do want to share with her every gory detail of the nightmare that happened to me there, no edits, nothing left out. My life, wrecked all over again. The injustice. After the thousands of micro-assaults I’ve endured over the years, the rape by eye every time I walk down the street, it’s me who ends up on trial. I wish I could tell my story to Katherine Ross, my older patron, my sexually empowered, badass editor. She’d get angry with me, for me. I’d feel like there was someone else who got it. Got me.
But that’s not going to happen, because she’s on to me, properly suspicious. She asks me outright what I’m doing, like I’m going to tell her! Right then, I’m thinking, we’re no way there yet, because she’s learned nothing. Then, I ask her about her little meltdown back on the massage table and when she tells me, something hits me: Am I actually making a massive mistake?
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